A power supply is an electrical device that supplies electric power to an electrical load by converting electric current from a source to the correct voltage, current, and frequency to power the load. Moreover, a voltage regulator is an electronic circuit that provides a stable direct current (DC) voltage independent of the load current, temperature and AC line voltage variations. Accordingly, power supplies and voltage regulators are used to provide a desired operating voltage to the various electrical components included in a given system (e.g., such as a server).
However, the voltage output provided by power supplies and voltage regulators for a server are often designed to meet the voltage tolerance limits of all supported options. Due to the number of resistive elements in the server (e.g., such as connectors, cables, field effect transistors (FETs), fuses, etc.) the power supply and/or voltage regulator output voltage is often increased in conventional products to compensate for the voltage drops associated with the various resistive elements, and ensure minimum voltage limits are met for all options supported in that system. While this scheme is usually able to compensate for the voltage drops, increasing the power supply and/or voltage regulator output voltage negatively impacts the efficiency of the server. For instance, increasing the output voltage of the power supply causes increased switching losses on downstream voltage regulators, while increasing the output voltage of the voltage regulator(s) increases the power consumption of the load. Moreover, this reduction in efficiency is unnecessarily applied to conventional systems that are populated with options that have wider voltage tolerance limits.